A bunch of research has been done lately looking at kids’ long term retention for important personally experienced events.

An important question in this regard is what effect intervening experiences have on those memories.

• On the one hand some folks have found that intervening recall attempts can improve memory for the original event.
• Others have shown that postevent information can distort that memory

The study looked at 3 year olds and 5 year olds and their memory for a routine medical checkup. The children were randomly assigned to one of four conditions described above.

All children received an initial interview immediately after the checkup and another interview 12 weeks later. Midway between this period the children either.

• Received an additional interview (i.e. this group was interviewed three times). Interviews included (a) open ended questions (b) yes/no questions (c) elabtorations and (d) leading questions. The yes/no questions included some absent feature questions about aspects of the event that did not happen. Children also asked 8 extra-event questions. These were about things from the videotape that did not happen to the child.
• Watched a videotape of another child receiving an examination. Videotape showed aspects of the exam that the child had actually experienced as well as 8 new actions that the child had not experienced
• Returned to the examination room to perform an unrelated memory test.
• Control condition, nothing happened during the intervening period

Present Features

Older kids more likely to report present features in free recall than were younger kids on immediate recall. Additionally, older kids recalled more present features overall on immediate recall.

For open ended questions the additional interview and videotape conditions produced more present features than did the control condition. The office visit group did not significantly differ from the control condition.

These differences did not remain when total recall was examined. Principe, et. al then combined the three experimental groups and compared it to the control group and found that the kids recalled significantly more in this new combined experimental condition than in the control condition. (page 70 wanky analysis!)

Also, kids who were in the control condition and Return to Office condition recall significantly fewer presented details after the delay than on the immediate test. Kids in the Additional interview and Videotape condition, by and large, did not show significant forgetting (Table 3, again wanky analysis).

Absent Feature Questions (see table 4)

Remember these are yes/no questions about medical procedures that the kid did not experience but that are typical of a child wellness visit. So the correct answer to these questions is "No". Intrusions occurred when kids falsely volunteered that the medical procedure happened during an open ended question. In response to the absent feature questions themselves there were three possible responses: false alarms, correct rejections, Don’t know(no response).

When you boil it all down there were main findings here:

• Intrusions were, with one exception, quite rare. Errors were in response to the yes/no questions
• 5 year olds were more accurate on average than 3 year olds
• Intervening experience had little impact. The one exception to this was for the 5 year olds in the videotape condition who had significantly more intrusions and significantly fewer correct rejections.

Remember these are yes/no questions that are medically related but that are not part of the typical script of a child wellness visit. The same types of responses are possible as for the absent feature questions.

When you boil it all down there were main findings here:

• Intrusions were again rare and this time there were no exceptions to this.
• 5 year olds were more accurate on average than 3 year olds
• Intervening experience had little impact on three year olds. For five year olds watching the videotape and returning to the office both decreased the rate of correct rejections.

Intervening experiences (interviews and videotape) increased correct recall, especially unprompted correct recall.

Return visit to office did not facilitate correct recall. Authors provide an encoding specificity account. Interviews and videotape include more feature overlap than did revisiting the office.

Video and return visit also had some harmful effects on recall (i.e. decreasing correct rejections).. They explain this with a schema/source monitoring explanation. The video and office visit may have activated their knowledge of a typical visit (or even an actual previous visit) and this may have been confused with the relevant visit resulting in fewer correct rejections.